Epiphenomenal Qualia Analysis

Frank Jackson illustrates in his paper, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, that physicalism is not true based on his Fred example. Fred is a man who is like any one of us, except that he can see one more color than us, a new iteration of what we know as red. Fred is given tomatoes, and he sorts them into two piles, red1, the red that we can see, and red2, the color that looks like red to us, but is a completely different color to Fred. No matter what, Fred always sorts the tomatoes in this exact order every time, which to us, should prove that Fred can see one more color that us. The conclusion that Jackson makes is that physicalism is false. Physicalism is a position stating that everything that exists is no more widespread than its physical properties, so basically there

To begin, we don’t really know what qualia “are”, because qualia are an excrescence; they do nothing and they explain nothing. So if they don’t help explain anything, then how can we explain still that physicalism is false? The answer lies in epiphenomenalism. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, epiphenomenalism is defined as, “the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events”. So what does this mean? It means that our reactions to things are based on life events, but still have no causal impact on the world. Say for example we got thirsty, we would go get a cup of water, correct? This is due to the overarching human instinct to get water, not based off of a thirstiness qualia, although that would be triggered as well, it just has no causal effect on our actions. So in the red1-red2 debate, Fred is correct in thinking that there is another color that we see, he senses it, yet we can’t, it is a real thing. This helps explain that there is something that physicalism can’t explain (red2), but that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a non-physical substance